Jen Sammons
Writer and Educator
About
Jen is an educator inspired by the schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy. In early childhood and college classrooms alike, she works to make under-represented voices visible and audible, calling on multimodal discourse and co-creation of knowledge as critical pedagogical tools.
Jen's writing is transgenre-- drawing on elements of narrative non-fiction, lyric essay, and poetry to create and eschew form. Her work exists in the spaces between joy and grief, memory and reflection, feeling and reason. She writes to examine the complexities of love and family as well as to shed light on systemic issues surrounding children's welfare and mental health systems, amplifying voices and calling for change.
Essays
Click the photos to view work
AWP Intro Journal Award-Winner
Visitation
Tahoma Literary Review, July 2019
*Issue available for purchase
Aeolian A(e)ffects
Tahoma Literary Review, July 2018
*Issue available for purchase
Always Here
Slag Glass City, Dec 2016
Non-Transferable
River Teeth, Feb 2018
Trans/Substantiation
Palaver, Fall 2016
Bio
Jen Sammons lives in Dayton, Ohio where she explores the intersections of being a queer writer, mother, and teacher, and advocates for visibility in all three. She is the author of the chapbook, Trisagion, Creative Nonfiction winner of the 2018 Gertrude Press Chapbook Contest. Her essays have appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, River Teeth, Slag Glass City, and Palaver, as well as collaboratively in
the anthology, Resilience: Stories, Poems, Essays, Words for LGBT Teens. She is currently working on a book-length project about adoption, trauma and queer family-making. Jen holds an MFA in Creative Writing an Pedagodgy, an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Miami University in Ohio.
